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And lower your cpc… Here’s the most important tip for increasing your Google Adwords Landing Page Quality Score (LPQS): Follow Google’s guidelines. That’s it, and if you think I’m kidding, then just keep on paying $5.00 per keyword. Unfortunately, some broken campaigns just can’t be fixed, but if you’re creating a new campaign with a new URL, or have started a new account with new campaigns, just follow the rules and you should be able to lower your cpc down to less than $0.10 per click, or even as low as $0.02 per click. I know it’s possible because I’ve done it.

Here’s a portion of Google’s instructions on creating a high quality landing page (along with a few of my notes):

Provide relevant and substantial content:

• “Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.” Choose the most relevant page on your site that ties the content directly to the ad copy, and if you don’t have a good enough landing page, create one.
• “Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.” This is their indirect way of saying, don’t lead users to an affiliate site. But this doesn’t mean you can’t have a sign-up form.
• “In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your landing page consists of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), you should provide as much information as you can beyond what your ad describes. For example, if your ad mentions ‘Free travel information,’ your landing page should feature free travel information (versus links to other sites that do).” You have to read between the lines here. Yes, avoid trying to dupe your audience by creating links that just re-direct them elsewhere, and remember to create useful content. But on top of that, make sure that the keywords that you’re targeting in your campaign are included in the ad copy, as well as within the content of your landing page.

This last point is the most important. If your target keywords are concentrated, and are included in your ad’s tagline, and appear in your landing page content, you have a good chance of getting a decent LPQS.

When setting up campaigns, one of the most important sections to pay attention to is the Set Pricing page. Enter a Default CPC bid and CPC Content bid — any, it doesn’t matter because you can always adjust it and re-estimate. Then click on View Traffic Estimator, do not click Continue. The traffic estimator will give you an estimate of each keyword’s minimum cpc and placement depending on your bid. If the cpc is over $0.50 then the keyword will most likely get an OK to Poor quality score. If you have a grouping of keywords that have a minimum bid range between $0.03 – $0.40 (Great to OK) and one of your keywords has a minimum bid of $5.00 or $10.00, I’d recommend creating a separate campaign (and landing page) for that keyword and tweaking the ad copy further until it lowers. There’s little chance it will drop within that campaign unless you first improve the landing page and ad relevance. On a side note, if a keyword has a minimum cpc requirement of $0.30 and you set the bid at that amount so that it’s activated for search, if the keyword gets a high enough click-through rate, the cpc will most likely drop. It’s happened in my campaigns. On another side note, these are Google’s estimates before the ad goes live, so there’s a chance the prices can go up if the ad receives a low click-through rate. And if all of your keywords have an estimated minimum bid over $5.00, then you need to rethink your keyword groupings, copy, and/or content, and try again.

Advertising with AdWords these days is becoming more like SEO. Create, test, tweak, repeat. Gone are the days where the highest bidder takes first place. Follow Google’s rules for creating a high LPQS and you could see cpc’s in ranges you’d never think you’d be able to get these days. Here’s a screen shot of one of my recent campaigns.

The minimum cpc range is $0.02 – $0.05 (left column), but I’d originally set the max cpc (second column) much higher, which is why some of the average cpc’s (right column) are $0.15 and $0.16. My conversion rates were pretty high (around 20%) which resulted in pretty low cpa’s, at least for my industry. And here’s one other tip — don’t resubmit rejected ads often. You can get banned from AdWords which will make your life as an advertiser a living hell.

Stick with a concentrated keyword list for each campaign, create ad copy that includes the main keyword phrase(s), and make sure your landing page content is directly related and you should be able to get a very high landing page quality score and very low cpc’s. That’s all, folks!

[Note: Please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments section.]

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